Elephant Valley Project

Come for the elephants, stay for the community development and land-rights activism!

I think it was when I was looking through the Lonely Planet Cambodia book that I first had the idea of spending a week at the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri. Mondulkiri is in the northeast corner of Cambodia, close to the border of Vietnam. I think the original idea was just to protect elephants, to create a bit of a retirement home for elephants who had been mistreated or overworked during their lives. These are elephants who carried tourists on their backs, or had to haul heavy logs around.

But in order to help the elephants, you have to help the community. The Bunong community is an ethnic minority in northeastern Cambodia, less than 1% of the population. Their language and their culture is different from the predominant Khmer. Most of Cambodia is Buddhist; the Bunong are animist, believing in the spirits of the trees and the rocks and the elephants. Elephants are a very important part of their traditional culture. But as with endangered creatures everywhere, the Bunong and their elephants are facing destruction of habitat. Chinese corporations are buying the land, razing the forest and planting rubber plantations and pine trees. Some families can no longer afford to feed their elephant, because the forest has disappeared.

But in order for EVP to convince locals to send the elephant to EVP, they had to “buy out “the elephant’s time. An elephant is an important source of revenue to the family, so it has to make sense to them. There are some elephants here to whom EVP is paying the family 30 kg of rice per month, 1 kg per day. In that way, the family is not losing the income from the loss of their elephant’s work. EVP will also reimburse any family whose fields are destroyed or trampled by an elephant. Because EVP has the only vehicle in this Bunong Village, they also end up being the ambulance service for the people of the village. If there’s an accident in the middle of the night, a complication of childbirth, EVP will bring the patient to town. As an ext3ension fo that, EVP now has it worked out where they will pay for the medical care for all of their workers and indeed the whole nearby Bunong village, even if the patient must go to Phnom Penh for a higher level of care.

Caring for the elephants is one thing, caring for the local families is another thing, protecting the indigenous land from corporate buyouts is another thing. It took EVP seven years to establish a land trust; they now have 1500 hectares of protected forest in which the elephants can roam (most sports fields are one hectare, Google tells me). We watched a really great movie, called “The Last of the Elephant Men” (available to stream on Amazon Prime), that tells the story of a dying man who used to be an elephant “catcher”. He would take elephants from the forests when they were babies, and sell them into captivity. As he is dying, he tries to visit the elephants he captured and ask their forgiveness. It is also the story of how the Bunong people had their land stolen from them. Very sad, of course.

Some of the elephants are retired to EVP from local families, some of them come from further away. Sambo, one of the most famous elephants in Cambodia, gave rides to tourists in Phnom Penh for 30 years. She came to EVP with a foot abscess that had been there for years. She had not seen another elephant in 30 years and had forgotten how to eat from the forest, how to trumpet, how to communicate with other elephants. Her tail had been partially amputated, and her leg was scarred from the chains of the Khmer Rouge. It was so lovely to see her with Ruby, another rescue elephant, walking in the forest and winding their trunks around one another affectionately.

Each day we were there, Declan and I spent half of the day with the elephants, and half of the day helping out with various construction projects. Declan loved helping out with the elephant health checks, and also with the construction projects. We happened to be there at the same time as a group of three young filmmakers from England; they were doing a documentary on EVP as their final school project. Their “hand-in” day is May 8th; I really look forward to seeing their documentary. They were cheerful and funny and really nice to Declan. They were very young but still very grown-up; they were much closer to Declan’s age than my own.

Off to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat!